Originally Published By:

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow appears to most as a macrobiotic, health-savvy goddess of Manhattan — a far cry from Kelly Cantor, the self-destructive, alcohol-addicted music superstar she plays in “Country Strong,” FOXNews.com reported Thursday.

Surprisingly, one of the inspirations behind the tragic Cantor — who returns from rehab early in an attempt to revive her career — was Britney Spears.

“You see a lot of these themes in real life, while I was writing the script a lot of those things that were happening with Britney Spears were very public,” writer/director Shana Feste told FOXNews.com.

“Spears was shaving her head, and I saw how fixated we are as a society in building people up to see their downfall and then the pleasure we take in building them up again … it felt like it was a very timely story just borrowing from what I had seen in the media,” Feste added.

When it came to morphing herself into a super-famous singer, Paltrow turned to someone other than Spears as a source of inspiration though.

“I picked the brains of my girl singer friends more. I obsessively watched Beyonce perform, she is ‘it’ in terms of a performer — if I could just get a little bit of that abandon she has on stage, that’s what I was really focusing on,” Paltrow explained.

But given that Paltrow’s public persona is as far removed from Spears as one could imagine, as it turns out, the actress was initially dissed by the studio behind “Country Strong.”

Screen Gems President Clint Culpepper initially balked when he found out Paltrow was attached to the project.

“He thought everyone was so crazy because I was so wrong,” she said. But the 38-year-old was so eager to prove a point, she even granted Feste’s request to “get rid of those yoga arms” and joined the rest of the cast and crew by indulging in copious amounts of oil-smothered foods while filming in Tennessee.

“I ate lots of fried food, fried chicken and there is this restaurant that makes a slider out of a biscuit with fried chicken — it is really, really good,” Paltrow said.